Kodoku
by MaidenInTheMoon
Summary: “No one deserves loneliness, not even a traitor like you. If you go, you will be lonely.” Sasuke kills his brother and joins Akatsuki, returning to the leaf to falsely gain Naruto's trust. Soon Sasuke finds himself tied to his past and to Naruto. SASU


**X::X::Kodoku::X::X**

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_Ohayo!! It's 3:30 in the morning and Maiden is BURSTING w/energy!!! While in the shower last night, this BRILLIANT idea SPRANG into my head!  
  
Brilliant? Can't believe I just said that  
  
Anyway . . . before I begin, I'd like to discuss my title a little bit. I first heard the word Kodoku while watching Fushigi Yugi, and it happened to be the drug that Nakago had Yui give to Tamahome.  
  
Fushigi Yugi is a rather shoujo-ish anime, so I won't be surprised if y'all have no clue what I'm talking about, but in the anime it made Tamahome turn against his loved ones.  
  
Well, being a simple-minded person, I paid no heed. The next time I encountered the word was while I was watching Naruto EARLY episodes. Episode two or three perhaps? Sasuke used the word when describing how having prying parents cannot compare to the agony of true loneliness. This happened right before he told Sakura she was annoying ::score one for the SasuNaru fans::  
  
Since then, I have been working around the word so place it with a suitable piece of fiction.  
  
If any of you are wondering (I pray you aren't) what happened to the last thing I wrote . . . well it's simple, I killed it. I may not have very MUCH potential, but I couldn't stand how low-caliber it was.  
  
In closing, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it (I enjoyed it? ::stabs self::) and I'd like to dedicate this to my crew at livejournal!! Even though I'm sure half of them think yaoi is the antichrist, haha, in your face Arkies!_

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_**::Kodoku:: - Solitude, Isolation, Loneliness**_

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By: MaidenIntheMoon  
  
Summary: "No one deserves to be lonely, not even a traitor and coward like you, if you go Sasuke, you will be lonely." Sasuke kills his brother and takes his place in Akatsuki, returning to the leaf to pose as the old Sasuke and offering Naruto his love. What happens when his plan backfires and he finds himself becoming strongly bonded to his past life?  
  
(SasuNaru) ::SasuNaru:: XSasuNaruX #SasuNaru#  
  
There, I think I got my message across 

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**Chapter 1: Chrysanthemum**  
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It was a cold night when a frightened and screaming little boy ran through the streets of his village in the country of the mist.  
  
He was screaming his throat raw and was gagging for air by the time his little hands threw open the heavy wooden doors leading into his warm kitchen.  
  
"KASAN!! MAKE THEM STOP FIGHTING!!!" The boy screamed as he buried his wet face in his mother's clean apron.  
  
"Slow down! Make who stop fighting?" His mother's voice soothed him as she instinctively patted the trail of his tears with her apron.  
  
"I don't know who they are!! They're strong!! They're shinobi! I'm worried about the village!" The boy continued through his sobs, now wiping his face on his own shirt.  
  
"Shinobi?" The mother's voice suddenly questioned, her eyes widening for a second and her face losing a significant amount of color.  
  
"Tama, run next door and inform your father, and tell him to find Mizukage, you're sure they weren't mist ninjas practicing?" His mother asked quickly, inherently knowing that no mist ninjas could scare her son this much.  
  
"H-Hai!" The boy stuttered before scampering off into the next room screaming, "TOSAN!!"  
  
The boy's mother shivered and pulled both her cloak and her son closer to her. She didn't know if it was the biting winter night or the sight in front of her that suddenly sent a feeling of needles all through her skin.  
  
She had been a ninja too, before she married and settled down. She had had her share of death and destruction, but as she stared at the unmoving body in front of her, she could feel the uneasiness coming from her husband as well as the Mizukage and various other village jounins.  
  
"This . . . He . . . is not an ordinary ninja, his robes . . . those are the regulation robes of . . . that organization . . ." The Mizukage managed to stutter out.  
  
A few of the jounin threw uneasy glances at each other and a few of them managed to mutter "Kisame."  
  
Tama's mother shook her head fiercely.  
  
"However, this is clearly not Kisame, just a member of the same organization, where Kisame is, we still have no information." She spoke up harshly, her voice jagged with a growing unease.  
  
"It's too late and too cold to decide anything today, we will however take the body and . . ." The Mizukage began but was unpleasantly interrupted.  
  
A shower of leaves began to fall lightly but quickly increasing its pace until what seemed like a small tornado was whirling frantically in the narrow alley. 

Unlike the other members of the inspection squad, Tama's mother did not look away as the torrent of leaves few down upon them. Instead, her gaze was fixed intently on the body.

She was met with two fiendish red eyes staring towards her as they hovered over the man's corpse.  
  
"Where . . . are you taking him?" She croaked as she used a minor jutsu to dispel the leaves tearing at her face and eyes.  
  
"Home, to bury him," was the only response she got before the two figures disappeared, leaving only a pile of leaves behind.  
  
"They're shinobi of the leaf." Mizukage quickly spoke as he picked up one of the verdant leaves and examined it closely. "It's almost impossible to produce leaves at this time of year in this country."  
  
"Mizukage-sama." Tama's father asked while casting his leader a baffled glance. "Should we inform Konoha?"  
  
The man under the large head covering was silent and still for a few moments before he turned to his jounin. "Send Konoha a wire at once! An S- class criminal has been destroyed and his body is being taken home!" 

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"Naruto?"  
  
"Give me back my ramen! WAH!! No! Ore-no ramen!!!" Naruto cried childishly in his sleep as he thrashed his hands wildly about, putting up a mad fight for the infidel who would dare steal his beloved ramen.  
  
Sakura's head lowered and a look of utter annoyance crossed her face. She ran her hand through her pink hair, long and shiny again before trying another time.  
  
"Naruto!! WAKE UP!!"  
  
The boy responded in a similar fashion.  
  
"Ramen!! I found you!!" Naruto cried gleefully as he ecstatically chomped down on his own pillow, his mouth filling up with feathers and down.  
  
Sakura decided there was only one last resort.  
  
What Naruto woke up to was his mouth being full of bird-feathers, and his head crushed unyieldingly between his hardwood floor and the bottom of Sakura's shoe.  
  
"Eh?" Naruto cried out loud before pulling himself out from under Sakura's shoe and resting in a cross-legged position.  
  
The blond rubbed his sleepy, blue eyes and first stared at his clock. He made a face when he registered that it was two-thirty A.M. and then decided to fix his gaze on Sakura, his glare demanding an explanation.  
  
"Jounin meeting!" She smirked and stuck her tongue out, then bringing her fist down on Naruto's head.  
  
"IF YOU DON'T START WAKING UP I AM NOT GOING TO COME GET YOU ANYMORE FOR THESE MEETINGS NARUTO!!!"  
  
Naruto didn't flinch, his gaze just remained fixed on her.  
  
Finally, he rubbed the top of his head and retorted. "No one told me that becoming a jounin would require me getting up at unholy hours of the night. If I knew that were the case, I would have just remained a chuunin forever, like Iruka-sensei"  
  
Sakura sighed and pointed nonchalantly at his dresser. "Get up, get dressed, get ready, the meeting starts in half an hour, Hokage's office" With that, she disappeared into the puff of smoke Kakashi had made so familiar.  
  
Naruto managed to stumble into his bathroom, but not without first clumsily crashing his head into the doorframe.  
  
He quickly found the light switch and placed himself in front of his mirror. Blue eyes studied every feature that reflected back at them.  
  
Naruto had grown a lot in the last five years, he had hit his growth spurt only two years ago and the resulting lankiness was a characteristic that he'd never seen in the younger version of Naruto.  
  
His whisker-marks of course were still perfectly intact and his bright-blue eyes had not been dimmed one bit, even after all the atrocities and pain it had witnessed.  
  
Naruto turned on the faucet and ran his moist hands through his unruly, golden hair in order to rub out any signs of bed head he may have acquired in his sleep.  
  
Picking up his toothbrush, he stared at the tired form looking back at him from in the mirror. These midnight jounin meetings were going to be the death of him.  
  
Naruto had been advanced to chuunin when he returned from his "mission" to recover Sasuke. Yes, that was the worst mission of his entire ninja career. That was one mission he would never again talk about, to anyone, ever.  
  
Since he discovered what Akatsuki's intentions were, Naruto had trained with no reservations. He needed power, not because he was hungry for it, but because his life hinged upon his own abilities.  
  
He had only encountered Akatsuki only once again in the last five years, and thankfully, Ero-sennin had been with him. Since then, Naruto truly admitted his reverence of the legendary Jiraiya, which resulted in him getting complimentary copies of Icha-Icha paradise.  
  
Naruto still called him Ero-sennin in secret though.  
  
Moving on to wash his face, Naruto's mind meandered back to his advancement to jounin. That had occurred only two years ago, and it was the most beautiful yet painful day of his life.  
  
Unbeknownst to him, jounin were only graduated in three-man teams. Of course there were teams whose members had been killed in various battles throughout the years, but the team's remaining members were obligated to stand on a podium in front of Konoha's shinobi and honor their deceased teammates.  
  
When it came to team seven's turn, Sakura was crying too hard to give any sort of explanation. Therefore, it was left to Naruto, who was always short for words when it came to Sasuke, to stand up in front of the world and explain what happened to their third member.  
  
Naruto himself was suffocating by the time he stepped down.  
  
Sakura and Naruto had been promoted to jounin then. No one was surprised that Naruto passed, but possibly the entire city was awed with Sakura's inaugaration. Since Sasuke deflected from the leaf, Sakura had bitten back her fears and trained. She had become a true shinobi, and Naruto was proud of her.  
  
"Yosh!" He cheered himself on as he climbed into his jounin uniform. "Time to see what they have to say tonight!"

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Naruto was the last to arrive and quickly found a spot next to a tired Sakura.  
  
"You were the one so full of energy half an hour ago?" Naruto questioned lazily as he offered her rice-cake he had picked up on his way to the meeting.  
  
Sakura gladly accepted the cake as she reached over and adjusted Naruto's headband. "It was falling over your left eye," she explained, "and it's not like you have any sharingan to hide."  
  
Naruto laughed and turned to look at the other ninjas. The jounin team had changed quite some much in five years. There were those people he had grown so close to, his fellow rookies from the academy days and Kakashi-sensei who was still amazingly alive. However, he couldn't help notice that with each meeting, a few faces were missing.  
  
He had always tried to be enthusiastic, telling himself they were just on a mission, but some of them never returned, and that was what hurt him the most.  
  
Of course, some of them never got to jounin level, some of them like Sasuke . . .  
  
Naruto now turned to look at the front of Tsunade's office, where she had suddenly appeared at her desk.  
  
The crowd of jounin silenced themselves and they all waited to be enlightened by whatever information the Godaime had to share.  
  
She looked unusually perturbed at this meeting and her lips could only reach a half-smile before they faltered and fell back into a frown.  
  
"We . . . received a wire this morning from the country of the mist" she began quietly.  
  
None of the jounin spoke.  
  
"It had some information that might make all of you want to be on your guard, maybe especially two or three of you."  
  
"Speak up Obasan!!" Naruto chirped energetically as a dozen or so jounin shot him disgusted glances.  
  
Tsunade's brow twitched unwillingly as she drew breath to finish the last of her decree.  
  
"Uchiha Sasuke has succeeded in killing Uchiha Itachi and Sasuke is coming home to bury his brother."  
  
If Naruto's mind had been a piece of glass, at that moment it would have shattered.

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_wOOt!! I am so stoked a/b this story . . . I hope y'all will be too.  
  
Um, as of right now (like 5:00 am?) I can't get onto my internet, screw you AOL!!  
  
So I'm gonna dance over to the library to have some people beta it, and yah . . . well, I hope you liketh?  
  
**Review s'il vous plait!! lt means please in French, but I'm sure you all knew that**  
  
So yah, if it's enjoyable, I want you guys to review, cuz when I don't get reviews, I'll know not to continue  
  
P.S. go to my bio and check out my deviant site, because . . . uh . . . well I don't know why! Just do it   
  
Maiden_

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_P.P.S. Where is the SasuNaru you ask? Well Maiden isn't one to rush things, so it'll be coming along, sometime soon _


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